She looked over her shoulder in the direction from which she'd come. “He thinks I killed her. Isn't that rich? I speak out in defence of him this morning, and by afternoon he's decided I did it. It's an odd way to say ‘Thanks for taking my part, Sam,’ but there you have it.”
It could have been the wind, of course, but it looked to Lynley as if she'd been crying. He said, “So what are you doing here, Miss McCallin? You must know that your presence—”
“I wanted to see the place where his fantasy died.” The wind had loosened hair from her plait, and wispy tendrils of it blew round her face. “He'd say, of course, that his fantasy died on Monday night when he asked her to marry him. But I don't think so. I think as long as Nicola walked the earth, my cousin Julian would have held on to his obsession of having a life with her. Waiting for her to change her mind. Waiting for her to—as he would say—really see him. And the funny thing is, if she'd crooked her finger at him just the right way—or even the wrong way, for that matter—he would've interpreted it as the sign he was waiting for, proving to him that she loved him in spite of everything she said and did to the contrary.”
“You disliked her, didn't you?” Lynley asked.
She gave a short laugh. “What difference does it make? She was going to get what she wanted no matter how I felt about her.”
“What she got was death. And she can't have wanted that.”
“She would have destroyed him. She would have sucked out his marrow. She was that sort of woman.”
“Was she?”
Samantha's eyes narrowed as a gust of wind spat chalky bits of earth into the air. “I'm glad she's dead. I won't lie about that. But you're making a mistake if you think that I'm the only person who'd dance on her grave, given half the chance.”
“Who else is there?”
She smiled. “I don't intend to do your job for you.”
That said, she stepped past him and walked off down the path, taking the direction he himself had traveled from the northern boundary of the moor. He wondered how she had come to be on the moor at all, as he'd seen no cars parked on the verge when he'd turned off the road. He also wondered if she parked elsewhere either out of ignorance of the presence of the hard-packed little plot of land behind the drystone wall or to hide her knowledge of the plot's existence.
He watched her, but she didn't turn back to see if he was doing so. She must have wanted to—it was human nature—and the fact that she didn't spoke worlds about her self-discipline. He himself walked on.
He recognised Nine Sisters Henge by the separate stone—the King Stone, he'd been told—that marked its location within a thick copse of birches. He came at the monument from the opposite side, however, and didn't realise that he was actually upon it till he circled the copse, took a compass reading just beyond it, reckoned that the stone circle had to be nearby, and turned back to see the pockmarked monolith rising beside a narrow path into the trees.
He retraced his steps, hands shoved into his pockets. He found DI Hanken's posted guard a few yards from the site, and he admitted Lynley to it, allowing him to duck beneath the crime scene tape and approach the sentry stone alone. Lynley paused by this and examined it. It was weather-worn, as one would expect, but it was man-worn as well. At some time in the past, indentations had been carved into the back side of the enormous column. They formed handholds and footholds so that a climber could ascend to the top.
To what use had the stone been put in ancient times? Lynley wondered. As a means of calling a community to assemble? As a lookout post for someone responsible for the safety of shamans performing rituals within the stone circle? As the reredos of an altar for sacrifice? It was impossible to say.
He slapped his hand against it and went under the trees, where the first thing he noticed was that the birches—growing so thickly together—acted as a natural windbreak. When he finally made his way into the prehistoric circle, not a breath of air was stirring.
His first thought was that it was nothing like Stonehenge, which was when he realised how firmly the word henge was rooted in his mind with a particular image. There were standing stones—nine of them, as the place name suggested—but these were far more roughly hewn than he'd expected. There were no lintel stones as there were at Stonehenge. And the external bank and the internal ditch that enclosed the standing stones were far less distinct.
He entered the circle. It was quiet as death. While the trees prevented the wind from reaching into the circle, the stones appeared to prevent the sound of the leaves being rustled from reaching into the circle either. It wouldn't be difficult for someone at night to come upon the monument unheard, then. He—or she or they—would merely have had to know where Nine Sisters Henge was or to follow a hiker there from a distance in daylight and wait for nightfall. Which in itself would not have been difficult. The moor was vast, but it was also open. On a clear day one could see for miles.
The circle's interior consisted of dying moor grass beaten lateral by a summer of visitors to the site, a flat slice of rock at the base of the northernmost standing stone, and the remains of half a dozen old fires built by campers and worshippers. Starting at the circle's perimeter, Lynley began a systematic search for Nicola Maiden's pager. It was a tedious activity, involving an inch-by-inch scrutiny of the bank, the ditch, the base of each stone, the moor grass, and the fire rings. When he'd completed his inspection of the site without finding a thing and knew he'd next have to trace Nicola's route to the location of her death, he paused to pick out the path of her flight. In doing so, he found his gaze drawn to the central fire ring.
He saw that the ring was distinguished from the rest in three ways. It was fresher—with hunks of charred wood not yet disintegrated into ashes and lumps, it bore the unmistakable marks of having been sifted through by the scenes of crime team, and the stones that encircled it had been disturbed roughly, as if someone had stamped on the fire to put it out and dislodged the barrier in the process. But seeing these stones brought to Lynley's mind the photographs of the dead Terry Cole and the burns that charred one side of the young man's face.
He went to squat by the fire remains, and he thought for the first time about that face and what was indicated by its burnt skin. He realised that the extent of the burning suggested that the boy had had a fairly lengthy contact with the fire. But he hadn't been held down into the flames, because if he had been, there would have been defensive wounds on his body as he struggled to free himself from someone's grasp. And according to Dr. Myles, there had been no such wounds on Terry Cole: no bruising or scratching of his hands or knuckles, no distinctive abrasions on his torso. And yet, Lynley thought, he'd been exposed to the fire long enough to be severely burnt, indeed to have his skin blackened. There seemed to be only one reasonable answer. Cole must have fallen into the fire. But how?
Lynley rested on his haunches and let his gaze wander round the circle. He saw that a second, narrower path led out of the thicket—opposite the path he'd come in on—and from his position by the fire ring, that path was in a direct line with his vision. This, then, had to be Nicola's route. He pictured the young people on Tuesday night, sitting side by side at the fire. Two killers wait outside the stone circle, unheard and unseen. They bide their time. When the moment is right, they charge towards the fire, each of them taking one of the two and making short work of them.
It was plausible, Lynley decided. But if that was what happened, he couldn't see why short work hadn't been made of Nicola Maiden. Indeed, he couldn't see how the young woman had managed to get one hundred and fifty yards from her killer before she was even attacked. While it was true that she could have fled the circle and taken off on the second path that he himself could see cutting through the trees, with the advantage of surprise on the killers' part, how had she managed to elude capture for such a distance? She was an experienced hiker, of course, but what did experience really count for in darkness, with someone in a panic and running for her life? And even if she wasn't in a pan
ic, how could her reflexes have been so good or her understanding of what was happening so acute? Surely, it would have taken her at least five seconds to realise that harm was intended her, and that delay would have been her undoing right then, within the circle and not one hundred and fifty yards away.
Lynley frowned. He kept seeing the photograph of the boy. Those burns were important, a critical point. Those burns, he knew, told the real tale.
He reached for a stick—part of the kindling of the fire—and aimlessly shoved it into the ashes as he thought. Nearby, he spotted the first of the dried splatters of blood that had come from Terry Cole's wounds. Beyond those splatters, the dry moor grass was gouged and torn up in a zigzagging path that led to one of the standing stones.
Slowly, Lynley followed this path. It was speckled with blood for the entire distance.
There were no great gobs of gore though, and not the sort of blood evidence one would expect from someone bleeding to death from an arterial wound. In fact, as he moved along it, Lynley realised that the trail did not offer the sort of blood evidence one would expect to find from the multiple stab wounds that Terry Cole had had inflicted upon him. At the base of the standing stone, however, Lynley saw that the blood had pooled. Indeed, it had splashed onto the stone itself, leaving tiny rivulets from a height of three feet, dribbling down to the ground below.
Lynley paused here. His gaze moved from the fire ring to the beaten path. In his mind he saw the picture of the boy that the police photographer had taken, his flesh eaten black by the flames. He considered all of it point by point:
Blood by the fire in daubs and splatters.
Blood by the standing stone in pools.
Blood in rivulets from a height of three feet.
A girl running off into the night.
A chunk of limestone bashing in her skull.
Lynley narrowed his eyes and drew a slow breath. Of course, he thought. Why hadn't he seen from the first what had happened?
The address they'd been given in Fulham took Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata to a maisonette in Rostrevor Road. They expected to have to deal with a landlady, custodian, or concierge in order to gain access to Nicola Maidens rooms. But when they went through the pro forma business of ringing the bell next to the number five, they were surprised to hear a woman's voice on the speaker, asking them to identify themselves.
There was a pause once Nkata made it clear that Scotland Yard had come calling. After a moment, the disembodied voice said, “I'll be down shortly,” in the cultured accent of a woman who spent her free time reading for parts in costume dramas on the BBC. Barbara expected her to appear in full Jane Austen regalia: done up in a slender Regency dress with ringlets round her face. Some five minutes later—“Where's she coming from, exactly?” Nkata wanted to know, with a glance at his watch, “Southend-on-Sea?”—the door opened and a twelve-year-old in a vintage Mary Quant mini-dress stood before them.
“Vi Nevin,” the child said by way of introduction. “Sorry. I'd just got out of the bath and had to pull on some clothes. May I see your identification, please?”
The voice was the same as the woman's on the speaker, and coming from the pixielike creature in the doorway, it was quite disconcerting, as if a female ventriloquist were lurking somewhere nearby, throwing her voice into a pre-adolescent child for a bit of a lark. Barbara caught herself sneaking a glimpse round the door jamb to see if someone was hiding there. The expression on Vi Nevin's face said that she was used to such a reaction.
After looking over their warrant cards to her satisfaction, she handed them back and said, “Right. What can I do for you?” And when they told her that her rooms had been given as a forwarding address for the post when a student from the College of Law had moved house from Islington, she said, “There's nothing illegal in that, is there? It sounds the responsible thing to do.”
Did she know Nicola Maiden, then? Nkata asked her.
“I don't make a habit of taking up lodgings with strangers” was her reply. And then, glancing from Nkata to Barbara, “But Nikki isn't here. She hasn't been for weeks. She's up in Derbyshire till next Wednesday evening.”
Barbara saw that Nkata was reluctant to do the dubious honours of announcing death to the unsuspecting yet another time. She decided to show mercy upon him, saying, “Is there a place we can talk privately?”
Vi Nevin heard something beyond the simple question, as her eyes indicated. “Why? Have you a warrant or a decree or something? I know my rights.”
Barbara sighed inwardly. What damage the last few revelations of police malfeasance had done to public trust. She said, “I'm sure you do. But we're not here to conduct a search. We'd like to talk to you about Nicola Maiden.”
“Why? Where is she? What's she done?”
“May we come in?”
“If you tell me what you want.”
Barbara exchanged a glance with Nkata. Oh well, her look told him. There was nothing for it but to give the young woman the nasty news on her own front step. “She's dead,” Barbara informed her. “She died in the Peak District three nights ago. Now, may we come in, or should we keep talking out here in the street?”
Vi Nevin looked completely uncomprehending. “Dead?” she repeated. “Nikki's dead?. But she can't be. I spoke to her on Tuesday morning. She was going hiking. She isn't dead. She can't be.”
She searched their faces as if looking for evidence of a joke or a lie. Apparently not finding it, she stood back from the door. She said, “Please come in,” in a hushed and altered voice.
She led them up a flight of stairs to a door that stood gaping on the first floor. This gave into an L-shaped living room, where french windows opened onto a balcony. Below it, water played in a garden fountain, and a hornbeam threw late-afternoon shadows on a pattern of flagstones.
At one side of the room, a sleek chrome and glass trolley held at least a dozen bottles of spirits. Vi Nevin chose an unsealed Glenlivet, and she poured herself three fingers in a tumbler. She took it neat, and any lingering doubts that Barbara had had about her age were put to rest when she tackled the whisky.
While the young woman gathered herself together, Barbara took stock of the living situation … what she could see of it. On the first floor of the maisonette were the living room, the kitchen, and a loo. The bedrooms would be above them, accessed via a staircase that rose along one wall. From where she was standing just inside the front door, she could see to the top of the stairs as well as into the kitchen. This was fitted out with a surfeit of mod cons: refrigerator with ice maker, microwave oven, espresso machine, gleaming copper-bottomed pots and pans. The work tops were granite, and the cupboards and the floor were bleached oak. Nice, Barbara thought. She wondered who was paying for it all.
She glanced at Nkata. He was taking in the low, butter-coloured sofas with their profusion of green and gold cushions tumbling across them. His gaze went from there to the luxurious ferns by the window to the large abstract oil above the fireplace. It was a bloody far cry from Loughborough estate, his expression said. He looked Barbara's way. She mouthed La-dee-dah. He grinned.
Having downed her drink, Vi Nevin appeared to do nothing more than slowly breathe. Finally, she turned to them. She smoothed back her hair—this was blonde and breast-length—and she fixed it in place with a hair band that made her look like Alice in Wonderland.
She said, “I'm sorry. No one phoned. I've not had the television on. I had no idea. I talked to her only Tuesday morning and … for God's sake, what happened?”
They gave her two pieces of information. Her skull had been fractured. Her death hadn't been an accident.
Vi Nevin said nothing. A tremor passed through her.
“Nicola was murdered,” Barbara finally said when Vi requested no details. “Someone beat in her skull with a boulder.”
The fingers of Vis right hand closed tightly on the hem of her mini-dress. She said, “Sit down,” and motioned them to the sofas. She herself sat rigidly on the edge of a
deep armchair opposite, knees and ankles together like a well-trained schoolgirl. Still, she didn't ask any questions. She was clearly stunned by the information, but she was equally clearly waiting.
What for? Barbara wanted to know. What was going on? “We're working the London end of the case,” she told Vi. “Our colleague—DI Lynley—is in Derbyshire.”
“The London end,” Vi murmured.
“There was a bloke found dead with the Maiden girl.” Nkata removed the leather notebook from his jacket and twirled a bit of lead from his propelling pencil. “Name's Terry Cole. He's got digs in Battersea. You acquainted with him?”
“Terry Cole?” Vi shook her head. “No. I don't know him.”
“An artist. A sculptor. He's got a studio in some railway arches in Portslade Road. He shares that and a flat with a girl called Cilia Thompson,” Barbara said.
“Cilia Thompson,” she echoed. And shook her head again.
“Did Nicola ever mention either of them? Terry Cole? Cilia Thompson?” Nkata asked.
“Terry or Cilia. No,” she said.
Barbara wanted to point out that there was no Narcissus present, so she could abjure her role in the mythical drama, but she thought the allusion might fall on unappreciative ears. She said, “Miss Nevin, Nicola Maiden's skull was smashed in. This might not break your heart, but if you could cooperate with us—”
“Please” she said as if she couldn't bear to hear the news again. “I haven't seen Nikki since the beginning of June. She went north to work for the summer, and she was due back in town next Wednesday, like I said.”
“To do what?” Barbara asked.
“What?”
“To do what when she got back into town?”
Vi gave no answer. She looked at both of them as if searching the waters for hidden piranhas.
“To work? To take up a life of leisure? To what?” Barbara asked. “If she was coming back here, she must have intended to do something with her time. As her flatmate, I expect you'd know what that was.”